Saturday, June 16, 2007

My phone contract has finally run its course and it's time to get a new one. I've been without my k750i for almost 2 years after it was pinched on my way over to San Fransisco, and my old t610 is great, but the charger doesn't fit well anymore and 1Mb onboard just doesn't cut it nowadays.

The N95 is certainly drawing the plaudits at the moment, but including a GPS that I won't use and a 5megapixel camera that stil doesn't beat our current digital, it's looking like overkill. I like the fact that it has a 3.5mm headphone jack, as there's lots of different things I could do with that (earbuds for on the move, headphone/mic for talking here at home, and output tospeakers for music).

I've settled on an e65 with a $49 cap plan at Optus and I must say. B. E. A.utiful!Just about all the features I was after came a neat little package. Actually, the size wasn't an issue to start with as I've used the K-JAM at work and it seemed an Ok form factor, but taking the e65 out of the box I was surprised how thin it was for what it could do. Fits in the hand well and even with a somewhat bulky hard case protector it's still thinner than I was expecting.

WiFi is awesome. Never going back. My mobo had wifi built in, but there was no real reason to install it as the system was flaky enough without running stuff I didn' need. It took 5 mins to get it up an running as an access point, most of the time finding the antenna and downloading the latest driver. With it up and running it was a cinch to start browsing straight from the phone. At work it was a tad bit harder to get past the proxy server, and entering the authentication each time I need to get out is painful and certainly going to make it all but a novelty. Connectivity brings all sorts of goodness though. I'm still getting the exchange setup at work to transfer over wifi, but once that's in it'll mean I can receive emails anywhere in the school.

Wifi also brings fring. When I was looking at whether skype could be put onto the e65, I stumbled upon fring as a solution for all voip apps that I use! amazing! Can't wait to test it out. In essence that could mean virtually $0 spent on calls as 95% of them will be within wifi zones. I'm going to be pushing it to get close to the $300 cap anyway, so it's probably a moot point. Hopefully wifi will help me out in Seattle too.

Setting ringtones was pissing me off, but Sandy finally found it hidden in profiles. Makes sense once you find it, but it seemed strange not being able to do a simple mobile task. Sandy was claiming that not understanding how a mobile works is a sign of old age. Pffft.

Contacts needed a bit of a shuffle as the t610 just brought them all over as individual numbers. I brought them into Outlook where it was a bit easier to organise them. You can't seem to set contacts in groups that translate from outlook into the phone though. I later found out that my St Luke's Outlook also had my contacts from a previous sync with the t610, so now I have doubleups too :/